tary result was soon perceived, in an improved tone of public feeling there; and although that policy of conciliation is yet (December, 1877) an experiment, there are abundant evidences of its beneficence and success in re-establishing a brotherhood of feeling between the people of the North and the South to which they have long been strangers. Such an object is worth striving for; and if the experiment shall fail, it will fail in a good cause. This measure, and a reform in the civil service of the Republic, were the most conspicuous features of the public policy of the Administration. The most essential feature of that civil service reform may be found in the following circular letter addressed, by President Hayes, to all the Government office-holders on the 22d of June, 1877: "SIR-I desire to call your attention to the following paragraph in a letter addressed by me to the Secretary of the Treasury on the conduct to be observed by officers of the General Government in relation to the elections: No officer should be required or permitted to take part in the management of political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns. Their right to vote and to express their views on public questions, either orally or through the press, is not denied, provided it does not interfere with the discharge of their official duties. No assessments for political purposes on officers or subordinates should be allowed.' This rule is applicable to every department of the civil service. It should be understood by every officer of the General Government that he is expected to conform his conduct to its requirements." This rule, strictly adhered to, would not only relieve office-holders of an enormous burden of taxation for partisan ends, but seal up, in a large degree, a prodigious fountain of official corruption and favoritism that has threatened, at times, to overwhelm our liberties and drown our free institutions. The subject of the Presidency occupied so much of the time and attention of the last session of the Forty-fourth Congress, that at its adjournment there was left a great deal of unfinished important business. There was, toward the last, so much factious opposition to the outgoing and incoming Administration, that Congress failed to pass important appropriation bills, and this neglect caused the necessity for calling an extraordinary session of the Forty-fifth Congress, to provide means for carrying on the Government. It was thought proper, at first, to have a summer session, but prudential reasons forbade it, and on the 5th of May (1877), the President issued a proclamation calling a session in October. When Congress met on the 15th CHAP. XXXII. THE NEZ PERCE INDIANS. 1783 of that month, the President in a message stated the object of their meeting, which was simply to make appropriations to supply money deficiencies; he presented a list of estimates of the amount needed, which aggregated about $37,000,000. It was expected that the session would be short, and it would have been, had only its legitimate business been attended to; but other subjects engaged the attention of members. The deficiency bills were delayed, and the extraordinary session was prolonged until the time for the opening of the regular session, on the 3d of December. During the summer of 1877, our Government engaged in a war with the Nez Percé (Pierced-Nose) Indians, in Idaho. It was not only a blunder, but crime, on the part of the United States. The story, briefly told, is as follows: The explorers of the Continent from the Mississippi River toward the Pacific Ocean, whom President Jefferson sent out in 1803, discovered the tribe of savages, in what is now the Territory of Idaho, called the Nez Percé Indians. They were friendly to the explorers, and from that time until recently they have been the unwavering friends of the white man. They were organized, as most of the tribes have been west of the Rocky Mountains, into bands, but had no general chief. About twenty-five years ago, an Indian agent—one of a class of men who have done much to create discontent among the Indians-forced upon them a grand chief, whose principal recommendation was that he could speak English (which he had learned at a mission station), and could be controlled by the Government representative. From that time there was discontent among the Nez Percés. They waited patiently for the chief to die, that they might again enjoy their old political system. But he was succeeded by another English-speaking chief, who was chosen in opposition to "Joseph," a member of one of the most illustrious families of the tribe. He was the father of Joseph, the leader of the band with whom our Government troops lately engaged in war. Old Joseph withdrew, in disgust, from the councils of the Nez Percés, but claimed the chieftaincy, if there was to be one. From time immemorial, the dwelling-place of the Nez Percé Indians hag been the beautiful Wallowa Valley, distinguished for its wealth of roots and fishing, as it now is for its abundant pasturage. Here begins the old, old story of the wrongs of the Indians. White people began to settle among the Nez Percés; and when they thought they were strong enough, they devised measures to dispossess these friendly barbarians of their beauti ful valley. In this nefarious work the United States Government participated. From 1858 to 1868, several treaties were made with portions of the Nez Percés, by which they were provided with a reservation, and annuities from the public treasury, in lieu of their lands. It was a mild and seemingly harmless way of dispossession. Old Joseph and his band refused to go upon the reservation, and remained in their ancestral home in the Wallowa Valley. So also did others of the non-treaty Indians (as those who were not parties to the treaty were called), for they claimed that the rest of their tribe had no right to alienate their lands. Old Joseph died in 1871, and left his son Joseph at the head of his band. He, like his father, denied the right of a portion of his tribe to give up their lands. Neither he nor his father had signed a treaty to that effect, and if they had, Government agents had so violated it, that even those who did sign it had a just claim to re-enter. Joseph might have claimed a larger tract, but he wished to occupy only the Wallowa Valley. Joseph and his band continued to occupy the Valley. Finally settlers began to encroach on the lands of the non-treaty Indians, which President Grant endeavored to prevent, by an order in June, 1873, that their possessions should "be withheld from entry and settlement as public lands, and that the same should be set apart as a reservation for the roaming Nez Percé Indians." Under this order Joseph and his band continued to occupy the Wallowa Valley in peace, until 1875, when President Grant was induced to issue another order, summarily revoking the first, and saying: “The said described tract of country is hereby restored to the public domain." White settlers now felt free to enter the Wallowa Valley, and they began to crowd the Nez Percés. The latter remonstrated, when they were peremptorily ordered to go upon the reservation. To their pleadings against the injustice, the reply of the Government was the gathering of troops to drive them from their lands into enforced exile. This meant war, if necessary to complete the cruel wrong. About one year ago, General O. O. Howard, in command of the Department of the Columbia, in his report to the Secretary of War, referred to the discontent of the Nez Percés and the righteousness of Joseph's claim to the Wallowa Valley, and implored the Government to send a commission there to "settle the whole matter before war was even thought of. The Nez Perces," he said, "have never been, up to the present time, hostile to our people." But the Government did not heed General Howard's wise and humane suggestions; and Joseph, who had held back for months from a resort to hostilities, to which he and his band were reluctant to engage in, at length, just before the time fixed for driving him from the home of his fathers, and seeing the soldiers preparing to invade his domain, he plunged into war. The country was startled by the announcement in the newspapers that "a serious Indian outbreak began in Idaho, about the middle of June CHAP. XXXII. END OF AN INDIAN WAR. 1785 (1877), when the savages of White Bird's and Joseph's bands murdered a score of settlers fifty miles east of Fort Lapwai. Captain Perry, who was sent against them, was severely repulsed. General O. O. Howard, making a forced march, came upon the Indians at the mouth of the Cottonwood, July 12, and, after an engagement in which eleven of his men were killed and twenty-four were wounded, shelled them from their position and put them to flight. On the 10th of July, Joseph's band had massacred thirty Chinamen on the Clearwater River." Then followed the usual events that mark the wars of our Government with the Indians-slaughter on both sides, and final defeat of the barbarians, for the odds are generally fearfully against them. The distressing war continued from June until the second month of the autumn of 1877, when, on the 5th of October, Joseph and his band surrendered to the victorious General Nelson A. Miles, at Eagle Creek, Montana Territory. In a speech made at the time of his surrender, equal in pathos to that of Logan, the Mingo chief (see page 747), Joseph said to General Miles: "Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking-Glass is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. on the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. May be I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I shall fight no more forever." He who led This war has embittered the feelings of the friendly Nez Percés against the white people, and planted the fruitful seeds of future troubles. In its origin and purpose, on our part, it was a "gigantic blunder and crime." After the destruction of Custer and his command by the Sioux under Sitting Bull, recorded in a preceding chapter, that leader and his followers fled northward into the British possessions, where he remained sullen and revengeful for more than four years. The United States Government appointed a commission to confer with him in his retreat to make arrangements for securing peace and friendship with the hostile tribe. General A. H. Terry, Commander of the Military Department in the Northwest, was placed at the head of the commission, and on hearing of the surrender of the Nez Percés, and considering it a favorable time to negotiate, they started for the rendezvous of Sitting Bull, near Fort Walsh. There they met him on the 17th of October, 1877. He and his chiefs rejected with scorn the proposals for peace made by the commission, and the latter returned. Then the British authorities gave Sitting Bull notice that if he should attempt to cross the border with hostile intentions, the British as well as the Americans would be his enemies. There he remained until late in 1880 nursing his wrath. Then perceiving longer resistance to be hopeless, and his followers experiencing great misery, he showed willingness to treat with the United States authorities for the return of the fugitives. Still there was delay. Early in 1881 about one thousand of Sitting Bull's followers surrendered; but the wily chief, fearful of peril to his life or liberty, did not give himself up till late in the summer. So it is, that the Indian has appeared conspicuously in our history, at every period, from the time when Europeans first trod the virgin soil of this new-found Western World, until now. His race is fading. Perhaps in another century it may disappear, and become a thing of the buried past. In future years, the son of a dusky exile, coming from the far-off borders of the Slave Lake, may be gazed at in a city street at the mouth of the Yellowstone with as much wonder as the Oneida woman, with her blue cloth blanket and bead-work merchandise, is now, in the city of New York. Even now these barbarians may chant in sorrow: Or, 'We, the rightful lords of yore, Like the red leaves on the gale, Fail, like shadows, when the dawning "I will weep for a season, in bitterness fed, |